October 16, 2010

Frieze fashion part one: clothes

At Frieze Art Fair this week we couldn't help but be impressed with the well groomed ladies that were admiring and buying the art. There was lots of style and a strong trend for very expensive boots and bags....not to mention fancy patterned tights (which we'll show you on Monday...too much for one post!).

Trends in brief....

Lovely coats. Nothing says style like a well cut coat, arty ladies like theirs with a bit of colour and print, a bit of embellishment and a bit of shape. I lusted after that Dries van Noten embroidered sleeve parka but I also loved the sleek boxy shape of the grey fur one worn with interesting boots.

Colour & pattern. Arty ladies SHOULD be good at putting colours together (although we saw a lot of black) and there were some great combinations of colour -aubergines/lilac and mulberries were popular as layering colours, and I loved the textured lace peeping out from the pencil skirt in navy...Chanel I think?

Leopard print. I know, but it looked great in black & white as a coat - there were lots of neat printed skin coats and bags too- and gorgeous as a cardi and top, multi layered in shades of blue with a matching ikat print bag, shouldn't work but did.

Long boots. Top trend, hands down, was for over the knee/very long/interestingly patterned boots. Worn either with tight solid colour trousers (the over the knee ones were mostly worn like this) or with knee grazing dresses. Only a small percentage wore the heels stupidly high, in fact the really high ones looked a tiny bit 'off the mark' here.

Neat, simple handbags. We saw lots of lovely, simple shaped (read 'expensive') leather bags, both small and giant size. The trend for bling-y hardware has been abandoned it seems, and replaced by minimal loveliness. There were also some really beautiful textured and embroidered ones, as you would expect from arty ladies. More of these to come on Monday's post.

Knee length. seem's like the arty ladies like their coats, skirts and dresses mostly just grazing the knee, or a touch longer (particularly if there's a pattern involved). There's a little bit of short (see above) but mostly this was on slightly younger gals. Nice when worn with patent boots.

The human ability to create different clothing styles provides options to others in making selection of designs that want to wear. That why today, we see different categories of clothes in males & females. Clothes range from casual to formal, trendy to semi-formal, traditional to party wear & so on.